National Curriculum takes 'joy' out of education

The introduction of the National Curriculum has taken the "joy" out of education as schools chase examination results at all cost, according to a leading academic.

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor

7:49PM BST 16 Jun 2008

Government control over the curriculum combined with regular testing has consigned many children to a miserable 11 years of compulsory education, said Professor Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King's College London.

In a speech, she said the "endless deluge of initiatives, plans, standards, guidance, and orders" over the last 20 years had made standards worse.

She said political meddling also risked undermining the Government's flagship diploma qualifications for 14 to 19-year-olds.

The courses - combining work-based training and academic study - were "shaping up to be quite as unworkable, and devoid of educational purpose and coherence, as hostile press reports suggest", she said.

Prof Wolf will deliver her verdict in a speech tonight(TUE) to the Royal Geographical Society in London.

It comes 20 years after the National Curriculum was introduced by the Conservatives to regulate the teaching of subjects in state schools.

The curriculum was later used to form Key Stage tests for pupils at seven, 11 and 14.

MPs on the Commons schools select committee recently called for a radical overhaul of exams amid fears schools are "teaching to the test" to boost their position on national league tables.

Prof Wolf said: "I think there are very few people now who do not feel that the result has been to trivialise the way many subjects are taught, to make lessons far too oriented to the passing of tests, and preparation for the precise questions that will be asked, and to suck not only the joy but also much of the point out of the increasingly long period our children spend in formal schooling."

In the lecture, organised by The Learning Skills Foundation, Prof Wolf said reforms over the last 20 years had more orientated towards changes to the way pupils are tested rather than wholesale changes to the curriculum.

"If you create something as large, complex and interconnected as we did with the National Curriculum, it becomes extremely difficult to modify it in any significant way, and that is exactly what has happened," she said.

"The result been endless pressure to pile up qualifications, which has had the inevitable result of degrading and devaluing them."